On June 19, Jenny Robb, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and Jared Gardner, director of Ohio State’s Popular Culture Studies program, discuss the exhibitions. Grab a spot on the plaza after the talk for our first Wex Drive-In of the summer.

David Filipi is the Wexner Center’s Director of Film/Video. In addition to his extensive work organizing film series and retrospectives of established and emerging filmmakers, Filipi has taught animation history for Ohio State’s Film Studies Program since 2004 and is a member of Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum advisory board. In the summer of 2008, Filipi co-curated Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond—the first exhibition devoted to the famed comic book artist—which received national acclaim and coverage by such media outlets as PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In 2013, he curated Fantastic! The Comic Art of Sandy Plunkett for Ohio University's Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens, OH. He received his master’s degree in film studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Caitlin McGurk is the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s Engagement Coordinator and works to cultivate and raise awareness of the library’s collection among students, comics communities, and the greater public. It is a mission she tackles with pleasure, sharing the treasures of the collection through social networking, classroom instruction and workshops, building relationships with contemporary cartoonists, and giving presentations at conferences and conventions. McGurk has also worked for the Center for Cartoon Studies’ Schulz Library, the Bulliet Comics Collection of Columbia University, and Marvel Comics. She has also written for Diamond Comics’ Bookshelf magazine for educators and librarians, published her own comics, and remains active in the comics community at large.

Jenny Robb is curator and associate professor of Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the largest academic research institution dedicated to cartoons and comics. Before coming to Ohio State in 2005, she served as curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco for 5 years. Robb holds master’s degrees in history and museum studies from Syracuse University. She is the author of several comics-related articles including “Bill Blackbeard: the Collector Who Rescued the Comics” in the Journal of American Culture and “From the Periodical Archives: Winsor McCay, George Randolph Chester, and the Tale of the Jungle Imps,” published in American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, & Bibliography. She has also curated numerous cartoon and comics exhibitions.

Jared Gardner is professor in Ohio State’s Department of English and Film Studies Program, where his classes include History of Comics, Comics and Time, and Film and Graphic Narrative. He is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Johns Hopkins UP, 1998); Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-century Storytelling (Stanford UP, 2011); and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Illinois UP, 2012). Other writings can be found at jaredgardner.org. Gardner also serves as director of Ohio State’s Popular Culture Studies.